“No one informs on the informer,” Jakub Procházka’s father smugly informs him. Jakub’s father is what’s commonly referred to as a secret policeman (although they actually weren’t that secret in Czechoslovakia), but despite rounding up citizens who aren’t big on communism, he nevertheless has a clandestine fascination in Elvis Presley. You only have to read a few lines of Jaroslav’s Kalfar’s debut novel to realise that you are undoubtedly in the land of the satirist Jaroslav Hašek and film‑maker Jiří Menzel.

Jakub is the Bohemian spaceman of the title: in 2018 a proud Czech Republic fires him off from a launchpad in a potato field to investigate a mysterious cloud of cosmic dust that has appeared between Venus and Earth. There really was a Czech spaceman, Vladimír Remek, who in 1978 became a cosmonaut courtesy of the Russians, and Kalfar makes a joke or two at the expense of Moscow’s space programme.

Kalfar emigrated to the US as a teenager. He writes in English and lives in Brooklyn, but you wouldn’t glean that from the text; it feels more like a superbly translated Czech novel. There are nods to Bohumil Hrabal and Josef Škvorecký, and the relentlessly inventive style made me think of the zaniness of Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts and his classic sci-fi play about Rossum’s Universal Robots, R.U.R.

The USA now boasts a literary subgenre of immigrant authors – Gary Shteyngart, Aleksandar Hemon, Edwidge Danticat, Josip Novakovich, Ha Jin, Yiyun Li – who, since arriving young in the US, have abandoned their mother tongue to write unmediated accounts of their home countries.

It's as if an episode of Star Trek has crashed into Milan Kundera’s The Joke

No one can accuse Kalfar of showing a lack of ambition. His first novel is bursting at the seams: as well as being about interplanetary shenanigans, it is also a history of the Czech lands from the middle ages to the present and, in the second half of the book, a thriller. Although Jakub is in space, he carries his family problems with him, not least his disintegrating marriage, which he ambitiously attempts to mend from afar. Really the book should be entitled “Historian of Bohemia”, as Jakub reflects on his family’s lamentable past and his nation’s woeful history. It’s as if an episode of Star Trek has crashed into Milan Kundera’s The Joke.

Jakub’s spacecraft is named after Jan Hus, the church reformer who, in 1415, was burned at the stake for heresy. Jakub is fond of the story that Hus (like Presley) defied accounts of his death, and lived out his life quietly and comfortably. And for Jakub, Hus is important because he is the first of many Czech leaders (Emil Hácha, Václav Havel) who have had to make unpleasant choices.

Jakub, like Hus, is presumed dead, but manages to return, incognito, to Earth to enjoy his obituaries and to admire his own statue. Kalfar perhaps chose 2018, a not very futuristic future, as the date for Jakub’s mission because, having given communism a firm drubbing, he wanted to reflect on current affairs. Wandering around Prague’s Wenceslas Square, which saw all the revolutionary excitement in 1945, 1968 and 1989, Jakub ponders: “Will we ever again march on these bricks in national unity, fighting yet another threat to Europe’s beating heart, or will this new Prague become an architecturally brilliant strip mall?”

2018, a space odyssey: Jaroslav Kalfař's strange debut is out of this world

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Jakub, and seemingly Kalfar, too, looks back wistfully to the glory days of Charter 77, when everyone had long hair, grooved to Frank Zappa and wrote “revolutionary essays”, but he is well aware that the generation who lived through that era probably didn’t find it so great at the time. The corruption of the nouveau riche has wreaked havoc in central and eastern Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall and rouses Kalfar’s ire.

Spaceman of Bohemia should win many fans. It’s Solaris with laughs, history lessons and a pig killing. I will be interested to see what Kalfar has to say about the US in the future.

• Tibor Fischer’s Good to Be God is published by Alma. Spaceman of Bohemia is published by Sceptre. To order a copy for £9.74 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.